


in heaven's high

by endquestionmark



Category: Borderlands, Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-21 21:47:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6059263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn’t the dark that wakes Rhys — odd as it sounds, but then he’s used to the constant ambient half-light of the ship, stars without and solid-state within — and it isn’t the silence, although it echoes: no footsteps in the corridor; none of the usual hum of life support; nobody on the air, telling him to get moving before all the hot water gets used up. It’s an old joke, and the sort that lingers in spaces like these. Like kicking tires or kissing dice or knocking on wood: call-and-response, just to make sure that someone’s there, just to feel a little less alone and shore up some sort of routine against the unbounded emptiness of space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in heaven's high

**Author's Note:**

> Rhys wakes up on a ship without lights; matters progress.
> 
> In space (horror), nobody can tell if you've written a specific homage or just a pastiche of the genre as a whole. Shoutout to [Mari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung) for some truly vicious enabling.

It isn’t the dark that wakes Rhys — odd as it sounds, but then he’s used to the constant ambient half-light of the ship, stars without and solid-state within — and it isn’t the silence, although it echoes: no footsteps in the corridor; none of the usual hum of life support; nobody on the air, telling him to get moving before all the hot water gets used up.

They never run out of hot water — one of the few perks of working on a repurposed industry-standard mining vessel — but it’s an old joke, and the sort that lingers in spaces like these, that thrives on the claustrophobic mutual avoidance and tolerance of working and living with the same people for months on end. It isn’t even particularly funny, not after the first week or so, but it’s better than nothing: a callsign, an all’s well. _Running low on hot water. Anyone want to go out tonight? Looks like rain._ Like kicking tires or kissing dice or knocking on wood: call-and-response, just to make sure that someone’s there, just to feel a little less alone and shore up some sort of routine against the unbounded emptiness of space.

If something aboard gives, anyway, it won’t be the machinery. Pallas might run hot and burn up fuel like nothing else this side of a carrier ship, but her systems will keep going, no matter what. Bases like this — built in orbit, and filled with air and light to drive out the vacuum, and populated to keep the last vestigial whispers of nothingness at bay — can keep running for years on their own with just a skeleton crew aboard. Pallas might not have an intelligent system onboard, but there’s a certain comforting fundamentality to her nature; she might not talk or think, but Pallas is no less present for it. If anything, the people living on a base tend to cause more problems than they solve; the human element, indefatigable and incorrigible and the most unrelenting stress test devisable, by design or accident, is dedicated to learning by doing, and by making every possible mistake, foreseeable and otherwise.

In the strange half-moments between sleep and wakefulness, Rhys thinks: what if he’s the only one left, on board. Like an early winter morning, waking up before anybody else to a tableau wiped completely blank, and wondering if everyone else in the world has simply disappeared — so maybe Rhys is more asleep than he is awake, but still — what if the ship is empty, what if everyone else is gone, what if Pallas is dead in the black. Just one more speck of debris at the very edge of the universe, distorted by gravitational lensing, hanging in a stable orbit around a collapsed star too distant to have a name: all of this reduced to a series of numbers, with so many souls aboard, and so many days to go, and so much fuel and so much air and so much nothing.

 _Jettison_ , Rhys thinks. _So much extrastellar jettison_.

That wakes him up, anyway, at least enough to realize that his cabin is far colder than it should be, even though the air is recirculated and heated throughout the ship. Rhys forces himself to sit up, instantly regretting the loss of the blankets, and dresses by touch and palm-light: undersuit, zipped up almost to the base of his throat, for insulation; tee, for the little added warmth that it’ll provide; flight suit, standard-issue grey, left open so that it doesn’t feel quite as stifling. His sleeves are still rolled up, and Rhys thinks, not for the first time, that he may as well go ahead and cut the right one off, at least. It’s not as if cybernetics are particularly temperature-sensitive, and if he’s being honest with himself, Rhys likes looking down and having a visual reminder of how far he’s come. Not everyone gets far enough, even in the private sector, to get the sort of bonuses that make major replacements an option. Rhys is good at what he does, and that means that he gets to make choices — upgrades — so that he can be even better at it.

By the time that Rhys sits down to pull on his boots, the lights still haven’t come on, and he thinks briefly about how far it is from his room to the control core — if he can remember the way — before he dismisses the thought. It’s a standard refresh cycle, the sort that Rhys usually sleeps through, or else someone’s gone and tinkered with the timer, maybe trying the polyphasic settings people are always going on about. The good thing about being on a base full of scientists is that nobody asks boring questions; the bad thing about being on a base full of scientists is that nobody asks before they turn the entire place into a convenient population sample. Rhys yawns and thinks ruefully about how he should have gone into management instead, some desk job with an annual bonus and an expense account: it wouldn’t have been worth it, though, Rhys thinks. It wouldn’t have been worth missing this. He does wonder, sometimes, but — compared to understanding how the universe works, no matter how slight that understanding may be, and where Rhys fits into it — it really hadn’t been a choice. He runs a hand uselessly through his hair and gets up; the cold is beginning to settle back against his skin, and if Rhys doesn’t keep moving he’ll just end up back under the blankets.

Even with the glass set into the wall — a circle of slightly lighter dark, all things considered; this far out, stars are few and far between, and their light doesn’t count for much anyway — Rhys gets to the door by memory. He almost definitely knocks over a mug on the way, and runs into what feels like a pile of bricks and is probably the logbooks from the past week, stacked for sorting, but eventually Rhys reaches the far wall, not particularly the worse for wear, and pauses for a moment. The light set into his palm won’t be good for much if he runs down the residual charge; in an hour or so, he’ll have enough stored from basic kinetics to power the servos all day, never mind a simple beacon, but until then Rhys is on his own. His optical overlay can’t tell him anything that he doesn’t already know: so many steps from his door to the corner, so many levels between him and the core. There’s no point calling up a display that he doesn’t need. Rhys considers, for a moment, calling control, and then dismisses it. Pallas could run without a single soul aboard. There’s no point worrying about nothing.

It’s all right. Rhys knows Pallas like he knows the periodic table; she changes considerably less, for a start, and the hallway will be lit — sodium-yellow guide lights set into the floor — no matter what. He can get to the control core and reset the refresh cycle, or from there he can get to life support or the engine rooms and sweet-talk whatever system is feeling particularly unloved and in need of attention this week. Pallas — colossus that she is, a silent monolithic curve of metal and glass and shielding — will hold.

Rhys opens the door and steps out into the corridor before he can think better of it, and the dark surges around him like storm swell, seeps into his eyes and his nose and his mouth and pulls him under.

For a moment, Rhys panics — instinctive and beyond his control, a response so complete and consuming that he can feel it, a frantic pressure that seizes him by the throat and builds in his chest — and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that he can do about it. Twenty steps, he thinks, it must be about twenty steps to the corner, and then another five to the maintenance ladder, and if he doesn’t move then he’ll be standing here forever, and if he doesn’t move then he won’t have light.

It always seems like a long walk to the ladder, too short to be routine but too long to be tolerable, but that’s when the hallway is lit. In the dark, Rhys shuffles sideways until he can lay his palm against the wall, and then follows it one tentative step at a time: he knows this hallway, sees it every day, but somehow the darkness has leached the familiarity from it. Months aboard, and Rhys has never seen the lights out, never experienced such total nullity of perception: Pallas always keeps a light on, somewhere. More than once, Rhys thinks that he should have reached the corner already, and that he’s gotten lost somehow, found himself in a different hallway altogether — endless and dark and cold, and he’ll turn one corner and find another, keep going until he’s hopelessly lost, with nobody for company but his own false reassurances and the doubt creeping in at the edges of what feels, now, more like desperation — and then his fingers catch, for a moment, on the edge of the corner, and then nothing.

Five steps, then, to the ladder, even more slowly this time — there’s no particular guard, just a clean drop from one end of Pallas to the other, all the way from the living quarters at her apex through the oxygen gardens clustered at her core and down, finally, to her nadir of data archives — and Rhys curls his fingers around the first rung that presents itself, just below eye level, and feels tentatively for a foothold, and then realizes: how is he going to count levels? He can’t see, and it’s not as if he knows the number of rungs from one level to the next, and if he lets go to feel for the edge of the floor then Rhys knows that he’ll fall, with all the certainty loaned to him by terror and incapacity.

Rhys clings to the ladder, unable to move, and knows that, sooner or later, he’ll lose his grip, and then it’s just a matter of waiting — for that first lurch, that moment of dizzy panic, and then for nothing at all — and a voice, crisp and clear and real in the dark, says: “Listen, kid. I gotta tell you, this isn’t looking so great.”

“What?” Rhys says. “Who’s there?”

“I’m your new best friend,” the voice says. “And, just saying, you know that schematic? The standard issue blah blah Pallas blah blah here’s where the floor is so that you don’t die? You might want to pull that up. Or you can just hang there and then—” A faint whistle, parsed through enough static that Rhys winces, and then a particularly evocative impression of a thud; the spatter goes on for quite some time. “Up to you!”

“Right,” Rhys says. “I forgot about that.”

“Funny how being scared out of your mind does that,” the voice says. “So. Got it yet?”

“Yeah,” Rhys says, and the schematic might not be adaptive — he can see where the ladder’s rungs should be, superimposed over the backs of his knuckles — but it’s much better than nothing.

“Great,” the voice says. “So now you’re probably wondering who I am, what’s going on, how come I’m so awesome, right? The big questions.”

“Uh, sure,” Rhys says. “Why don’t we start with the lights?”

“Ah,” the voice says, and pauses. “Right. See, here’s the thing: those aren’t coming back.”

“But they’re a failsafe,” Rhys says, even though he knows that it’s obvious even as he says it, because he doesn’t want to think about the alternative. “They’re hardwired into the system!”

“Lots of things are hardwired into the system,” the voice says, dismissive. “Doesn’t mean they can’t go wrong. Look. Rhys, right? Can I call you Rhys?”

“Yeah,” Rhys says. “Hey, you got it right.”

“Of course I got it right!” the voice says. “What’s so hard about that? Rhys. Easy. Anyway, look, the failsafe? It’s failed, so through the process of understanding basic words, you aren’t safe. Hate to break it to you, Rhys,” the voice says, “but unless you figure something out real quick, you’re going down with this pretty lady and nobody will be any the wiser.”

“Wait,” Rhys says. “Me? What about everyone else? What about the life rafts?”

“Yeah, about that,” the voice says. “When the lights go out, people get scared, right? I didn’t want to tell you this, but the life rafts are gone, kid. You’re the last man standing. Or climbing. Whatever. They left you behind, is what I’m saying. You’re on your own.”

“No,” Rhys says, half to himself. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“What am I saying?” the voice says, and for a moment Rhys clutches frantically at hope. There’s been a mistake. It’s all going to be fine. “You’ve got me! You’re gonna be just fine, pumpkin,” the voice says, and Rhys is left grasping at nothing. “Name’s Jack. I’m going to get you out of here. All you have to do is listen to me. Got it?”

Rhys presses his forehead to the next rung, cool metal against his skin, and exhales. “Yeah,” he says. They left him. Everyone is gone, and they’ve left him behind, and Pallas is dead in the black: it’s too much, for a moment, to process. “Yeah. What do I have to do?” Rhys says, as if by rote, because he doesn’t know what else to say. For a moment, there’s no reply, and Rhys says: “Jack? How do you know?”

“Huh? Oh, sorry,” Jack says. “Got distracted. Look,” he says, “call me a sucker, how’s that? Ship in distress, impossible odds, all that. And hey, if you pull it off, I bet a research ship has some pretty cool toys, right? Salvage, baby! Name of the game. Just saying, you’re lucky I was even in range.”

“No kidding,” Rhys says, fervently. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Jack says. “Hey, see if you’re still thanking me when you’ve climbed down thirty levels.”

“Thirty?” Rhys says. “Isn’t that life support?”

“Sure is,” Jack says. “Swing by the gardens, take a breather, see if we can get the heating back online before you lose any fingers. How’s that sound?”

“Thirty levels,” Rhys says, mournful, and feels for the next rung.

Ten levels later — Rhys knows, because Jack counts out loud, and tries to make the number last for the entire span of time from the first rung to the last — Jack manages, somehow, to get even more bored. “Rhysie,” he says. “Kid. You’re killing me here. Seriously? No small talk? No tragic backstory? Not even any sexy science talk? Ooh, radiation. Ooh, astrophysics. That kinda thing.”

“I’m sort of trying,” Rhys says, “to not die. If you want to start a conversation — and keep it going, and end it, because you’re just going to be talking to yourself here — be my guest.”

“Hey!” Jack says, and laughs. “It has teeth! Man, I knew this was a great idea. Seriously, though, tell me about yourself. Research, blah blah blah, five degrees, six specialties, and you’re out here? In the middle of nowhere? No way. I mean, I know you for-the-sake-of-knowledge types aren’t exactly great with the whole socializing thing, but this is taking it to a whole new level. Plus, I’m guessing you aren’t exactly doing it for the view.”

“Friends of mine,” Rhys says, moving a little more smoothly now that he’s gotten used to the rhythm of it. “Work friends, I mean, but hey. Couldn’t be so bad, right? Take a year, crunch some numbers, come back at the end of it and see if anything’s changed.” He falls silent for a few rungs. “Guess they weren’t such good friends after all.”

“Oh, hey, no,” Jack says. “Don’t sound like that. Look, hey, come on. You’d do the same, don’t tell me you wouldn’t.” He pauses. “Rhys? Talk to me, kid.”

“Yeah,” Rhys says, finally. “You’re probably right.”

“See?” Jack says. “Not so bad, huh?”

“Has anyone ever told you,” Rhys says, “that you’re terrible at comforting people?”

For a few blessed moments, Jack doesn’t say anything, and Rhys makes it to the next level in peace. “Nope,” Jack says, eventually. “Can’t say they have.”

“Right,” Rhys says. “Then let me be the first to say that you? Are shitty at it.”

“Twenty-five,” Jack says, making the vowels as nasal as possible, and drawing them out for far too long by any standard. “Nearly there! Don’t die when you’re five levels away. That would just be pathetic. Hey,” he says, almost as an afterthought. “Then I really would be talking to myself.”

“Don’t sound so sad,” Rhys says. “It’s basically what you’re doing anyway.”

“Sure,” Jack says amiably. “But this way you have to listen.”

“Next time, just let me fall down the ladder,” Rhys says. “Seriously. Wow. You really weren’t kidding about thirty levels.” He looks down; under normal circumstances, this would be a terrible idea, but Rhys can only see in schematics, architect-blue overlay narrowing to a distant vanishing point. There’s something else, though, a few levels down, a faint glow blurring through the projected lines of perspective. “What’s that?” Rhys asks.

“Oh, huh,” Jack says. “Should be the oxygen gardens, right? These big industrial bases, people just leave them for years and they keep running. Pick up all kinds of habits. Must be some kind of bioluminescence. Man,” he says, and Rhys thinks that he must be grinning. “This just keeps getting better.”

“Habits,” Rhys says. “I hope you mean the pretty kind and not the eat-your-face kind.” He climbs down the last few rungs before swinging away from the ladder, using his momentum to grab at handholds until he’s on solid deck plating again. “Can plants even digest — oh, god. Okay. Not thinking about that — definitely not. Right? No way. I knew I should have specialized in exobotany.” Rhys tries to stretch the ache from his shoulders, and regrets it immediately. “God,” he says. “No way am I doing that again.” He turns around. “Oh, wow.”

“That pretty, huh?” Jack says.

Rhys nods, and remembers that Jack can’t see him. “Yeah,” he says. The walls are lined with fans, running more slowly than usual, and he makes his tentative way between the tanks of hydroponics, careful on the slippery walkways. It rains, in the oxygen gardens, though the rest of Pallas stays cool and dry; recirculated water for recirculated air, and Rhys can smell it: not the particular sweetness of leaf matter, the warmth of real earth, but a certain clear green quality to every breath. So much of Pallas is metal and glass and synthetic, and Rhys forgets, sometimes, that he isn’t as well. Walking between rows of foliage — green and purple and blue, masses of mycelia and shifting leaves and odd organic forms that Rhys doesn’t recognize — it’s hard for him to think of anything else.

On the opposite side of the room, Rhys opens a panel and follows the labels overlaid on the switches — fans up, heating up, emergency grow lights on — and breathes a sigh of relief when the room fills with the hum of motors, the hazy reflective kaleidoscope of red and blue solid-state lighting, an instant warmth to the air made more evident by humidity. “Got it!” he says, and feels silly before he remembers that Jack is listening. “Jack?”

“Right here with you, cupcake,” Jack says, raising his voice over the fans. “Sure you don’t want to take a break? Smell the deep space fungi or whatever?”

“No, I’m good,” Rhys says. Just an inch, won back from the darkness, but it’s enough: he feels as if he could do anything, climb a hundred levels, chart a course into the unknown and trust Pallas to carry him there. “What next?”

“Attaboy,” Jack says, and the note of approval in his voice makes something in Rhys’ chest go light and dangerous and proud. “How do you feel about data archives? Good feeling? Bad feeling? We’re going to do it anyway feeling?”

“That’s access-only,” Rhys says. “What do I need from the data archives?”

“Well, schematics aren’t going to get you everywhere,” Jack says. “How about we get you a copy of the keys, huh? Start making some real useful changes. A sense of direction.”

“Sounds good,” Rhys says. “There’s a service elevator down the hall, but—” He pauses. “—Data archives are null atmo,” Rhys says. “Full suit and helmet, all the time.”

“So?” Jack says. “Suits have comms, right? Don’t worry, kid,” he says. “I wouldn’t leave you hanging. I mean, hell, you’re the star!” Jack laughs. “Next time, just ask!” He lowers his voice. “I just can’t say no when you sound like that, kitten.”

“Oh,” Rhys says, and runs a hand through his hair, rubs at the back of his neck for a second. He has a terrible suspicion that he’s blushing. “I mean. Thanks,” he says. “For, you know. Sticking around.”

“Come on,” Jack says, and he sounds dangerously indulgent. “You and me, kid. Let’s do this.”

Rhys leaves the garden behind, and steps back out into the waiting dark, and the door seals behind him.

The elevator is running. Everything seems to be, except for the lights: people get scared, Rhys thinks, and then they make choices driven by panic rather than reason; people get scared, and then, usually, they die. Space doesn’t reward panic, and it doesn’t forgive poor reasoning. Even at the very edge of the atmosphere, choices come down to a very simple binary: think or die, air or vacuum, heat or abyssal cold. Rhys stands in the center of the elevator, on an empty dark ship, and listens to the smooth hum of engaged magnetics, and decides that he intends to live.

“Hey,” Jack says. “Anybody home?”

“Yeah,” Rhys says, turning automatically to the speaker set into the control panel, and then looking away. “Just thinking.”

“Yeah?” Jack prompts, after a while. “Anything fun? Big plans, revenge, any of that? I know I said sexy science talk before, but I was lying. No science. Come on, there’s gotta be something you want to do when you get out of here.”

“I mean,” Rhys says, and then catches himself. “I guess science doesn’t count, right?”

“Look,” Jack says. “If all your big plans involve making it past tenth author, then I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you definitely need better dreams. Come on!” Rhys shrugs. “Nothing? See the galaxy, run your own ship, go where nobody’s gone before!” Jack laughs. “I mean, hell, kid. Stick around long enough, and I guess you could be the first person to go through a black hole without getting sandblasted by the accretion disk.” He pauses. “But with radiation. That isn’t better, is it?”

“Wait,” Rhys says. “No — we’re not — Pallas is in a stable orbit, we aren’t going over the event horizon. What are you talking about?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jack says. “Guess I should’ve mentioned. You and your lady here? Right on the edge of a stable circular orbit. Any closer and you’ll start to precess. This is your corner, right? Astrodynamics? Because let me tell you, it sure isn’t mine.”

“No!” Rhys says, and then goes on: “I mean, I know what you’re talking about,” because Rhys is allergic to the words _I don’t know_ , “but we should be way past that, right? There’s no way we’re going to go over innermost bound. Pallas is set to orbit at twice that radius.”

“Look,” Jack says, and Rhys thinks that he must be shrugging. “Just telling it like I see it, kid. Either way, do you really want to hang around and find out?”

Rhys thinks about it.

“Tell me you aren’t thinking about it!” Jack says. “Look. You can’t get published from the middle of a singularity. I mean — what do I know, I’m just guessing here, but — it seems like kind of a long shot.”

“I’m not thinking about it,” Rhys lies, and sighs. “It’s just — I can’t think about it, okay? All of this — I don’t want to die,” Rhys says helplessly, and the words hang there, inelastic and unchanging, and take up all the remaining space.

Jack, astonishingly, laughs. “Die!” he says. “No, come on, nobody’s dying. Unless I just get that bored,” he says, “but hey. It hasn’t happened yet. Come on, Rhysie! I’ve got you! We’re going to have a great time, okay? Get you the keys to the kingdom, get this lady up and running, then you can get as mopey as you like. Now that’s kinda hard when you have a hundred galaxies at your feet, in my experience, but hey. Whatever keeps you going, kid.”

“Keys to the kingdom, huh,” Rhys says, and smiles despite himself.

“Oh, yeah,” Jack says. “All the way to the top, baby! How about it, kid?”

The elevator hums to a stop, and a synthesized voice warns Rhys that, beyond the airlock, he will need protective equipment. He steps through into the antechamber and starts fitting on the pieces of the suit: first, the main body garment, with pressure and thermal layers, which seals its back seam automatically; next, monitoring tabs, connected at his throat and wrists; boots and gloves, heavy material that makes all his movements slow and deliberate; last, the helmet, a clear bubble of polycarbonate. When Rhys pulls it on, the helmet seals to the ring at his throat — a faint pressure over his collarbone — everything goes empty and close and quiet. For a moment, Rhys thinks that he’s completely alone, with nothing but the hiss of his own breath for company. “Jack?” he says, too loud in the sudden silence.

“Hey, hey,” Jack says, voice crackling through the tinny speakers of the helmet. “Oh, wow. I sound like shit.”

Rhys exhales, shaky with relief. “Sure,” he says. “What am I looking for?”

“Well,” Jack says. “That’s tough. Should be on the schematics — long-term storage, all the way down in the stacks — just one chip, probably unlabeled. Old skeleton keys, that kind of thing.”

“Unlabeled,” Rhys says, and makes his clumsy way across to the airlock. “Great.” He opens the door and steps in, waiting for it to seal after him, and then hits the button covered in warning signs.

The airlock vents with a hiss, and Rhys pushes off, going from one handhold to the next as he takes stock. Up, down, none of it has any meaning without artificial gravity: he could have fifty levels to climb or fifty to fall, and Rhys makes the most of his remaining momentum. The archives are set into the walls, endless rows of embedded chips, lit through like old lucite. Rhys skims over the surface of thousands of lifetimes’ worth of data — an expanse of lights as far as he can see in every direction — like a stone skipped over an infinite starfield. As if he’s flying under his own power, each light its very own world, lightyears flickering by with every second: by the time that Rhys stops, in the furthest reaches of the archives — first in, last out — where the oldest storage is, he feels as if he’s reached the edge of the universe, the very beginning of eternity.

“Should be around here somewhere,” Jack says, static crackling through his voice, words stretching and cutting out halfway through. “Take a look. You’ll know it when you see it — schematics should go wild — locks and keys, right? Let me know when you’ve got it.”

Rhys starts looking — pressing at the bases of the chips until they unlock and side out, one at a time, spars of synthetic crystal — the only sound that of the mechanism and his own breathing, and the way that Pallas settles, slow and almost imperceptible, into new rhythms. Warmth and air and the slow decay of her orbit, sliding gradually from circular to elliptical, the wobble of an astronomical top.

After a while, Jack starts humming.

“What is it?” Rhys says. “The song, I mean. I feel like I should know it.”

“Oh, that,” Jack says, too casual to be true. “No idea. Just something I heard once, you know? Some old programmer joke, probably.” He goes quiet. “I’ll just let you get on with it, huh.”

“No, it’s okay,” Rhys says. “You can keep going. I mean, if you want.”

For a moment, Jack is silent, and Rhys thinks that he’s asked too much, somehow, been overly presumptuous. “Sure,” Jack says, eventually. “Something to do, right?”

A verse — or what Rhys thinks must be one — later, as Jack goes further and further off-key, something lights up in Rhys’ optical overlay, goes wild with labels and the sort of legalese that Rhys hasn’t seen since he first activated his implant, staring at the ceiling of a recovery room. “Hey,” Rhys says. “I think this is it.”

“Yes!” Jack crows. “That’s what I’m talking about! Great. Get yourself back to that airlock and peel yourself out of that bubble suit, then we can get down to some real business.” Rhys tucks the chip into one of the suit’s compartments and turns, realigning himself so that he isn’t looking at a starfield, but rather a cliff face, and then a vertical drop, and swings himself back into motion. “Nice work,” Jack says. “I have to tell you, that was kind of a long shot. I mean, do you know how many chips there are in here? What are the odds, seriously!”

“Guess I’m just lucky,” Rhys says, and reaches for the next handhold—

—and misses—

—and goes spinning away from the lights, away from the vertical face of the archives, out into the null space between the interior wall and the hull, momentum enough to keep him going but not enough to carry him across.

For a second, Rhys is too shocked to move — to breathe — to do anything but hang there, watching the archives revolving around him slowly, and then he gasps, a great shocked breath, terror and misplaced relief. He isn’t dead. His suit hasn’t depressurized. He hasn’t run out of breathable atmosphere. He’s alive.

“Well, shit,” Jack says. “I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that whatever just happened wasn’t in the plan, right?”

“No,” Rhys says, “I missed a handhold — I can’t reach — I don’t have any leverage,” he says. “I’m fucked, right? I mean, I don’t have momentum, I don’t — I’m going to die here,” Rhys says, and is surprised to find that he isn’t so much scared as intensely irritated. All of this just to die because of a rookie mistake, no safety lines or hook or fulcrum point, and he’ll float here as their orbit decays, until Pallas slips over the event horizon and into the dark for the last time. “I’m going to die — that’s,” Rhys says, “that’s funny, right? It’s funny. Fuck,” he says, and curls into himself, turning a little in the vacuity, closing his eyes against the relentless sameness of it. “Fuck,” he whispers again. “I’m actually going to die.”

“Wow,” Jack says. “Seriously? You think I’d let that happen? No way, kid,” he says. “You’re not giving up now. You don’t get to die until I say so. Now listen to me,” Jack says, “you need a boost to get to that wall, and then you need to get to the airlock before you depressurize or freeze or run out of air, right?”

“Right,” Rhys says, uncurling himself a degree at a time. “Right. Yeah.”

“Good,” Jack says. “So when I say, and not a second before, you pick your least favorite arm, and you take off your glove, and you get over to that wall and pray to anything you hold dear that you beat the cold and the dark and the nothing. Got it?”

“Yeah,” Rhys says, and fumbles with the seal at his wrist — right hand, right arm — and thinks: it’s not as if cybernetics are particularly temperature-sensitive anyway. It’s funny. That really is funny. He says so, and Jack snorts.

“That’s one screwed-up sense of humor you’ve got there,” he says. “I like it.”

“Will this work?” Rhys says. “I mean, honestly. How good are my odds?”

“Come on, kid,” Jack says. “Don’t you trust me?” He doesn’t wait for a reply. “Go!”

Rhys does, fumbling at the mechanism, and for a moment the pressure holds, and then the archive whirls around him — a dizzying blur of sped-up lights, star trails in retrograde — and, for a second, he thinks that he’ll never be able to tell which way is up, where he’s supposed to go, how to get out.

“Come on,” Jack shouts, “get it together, Rhys,” and Rhys steadies himself, gets a glimpse of the airlock lights far above — faint red in the dark — and does his best to chart a course. He might not be able to feel the cold just yet, and the suit is doing its best to compensate, increasing pressure and airflow as his monitors go wild, but Rhys knows that he isn’t going to make it. The lights are too far, and he’s moving too slowly, and it’s getting harder to breathe from one heartbeat to the next. His pulse is very loud in his ears, and the rush of escaping air fills up the entire space between archive and hull, and he’s too far away.

He runs out of air three levels below the airlock lights, and stares for a moment at the handhold just in front of him. Jack must be shouting, but Rhys can’t hear it over the pounding of his heart and the panic rising in his throat, the horrible inescapable depletion of his last empty breath, and he thinks: there’s something he’s supposed to do, now. There’s something he’s supposed to know.

Rhys reaches out and takes hold of the rung, and pushes off, and then the next — asphyxiation-slow, thoughts dulled by exhaustion and emptiness — and then the next, and again, and he keeps doing it until the airlock lights are glowing directly in front of him — old stories, horn and ivory, false dreams and true — and Rhys drags himself through, closes the airlock with what feels like the last of his coordination, and stumbles.

The airlock’s schematic overlay blurs, then, and the room tilts, and Rhys listens to the hiss of air, of repressurization and atmospheric replacement, and tugs his helmet off with clumsy numb fingers. He gasps helplessly until he can focus again, and feels less as if his chest is caving in, and can think about something other than the sparks, circular cigarette-burn remnants, receding at the edges of his vision.

“Told you,” Jack says. “You aren’t dying without my say-so, not on my watch. Got that chip?”

Rhys fumbles at the suit’s compartment and pulls it out, turning it over in his hands. “Yeah,” he says. “This better be worth it.”

“Oh, I promise you it is,” Jack says. “Now, since you’ve got optics, I’m gonna go ahead and guess you’ve got some sort of port as well, right? Standard installation?”

“Temple,” Rhys says. “Wait. No. You aren’t serious.”

“Deadly,” Jack says. “You just go ahead and jack in. Ha,” he says. “Jack in. Get it? Anyway, come on, cupcake. The clock’s ticking. Get that plugged into your pretty little skull and then you’re golden.”

“All right,” Rhys says, dubiously, and brings the chip to his temple. “Here goes nothing,” he adds, and slots it home.

For just a moment, he can’t feel anything but the sensation of impact — full-body, as if he’s been picked up and dropped, or as if the room is tilting again, wall to floor to ceiling and back again — and Rhys wonders why it doesn’t hurt.

Shortly afterwards, the pain hits him. Impact after impact, and Rhys thinks that his bones will snap, that this must be what it’s like on planets where the gravity is double, triple, standard weight and force and pull multiplied a hundred times over. This must be what it’s like at the center of a black hole: to be crushed to nothing, to fall through the warp and weft of space and time, to be pulled out of existence altogether.

It isn’t long after that, though, that everything goes black. This time there are no schematics, and no comforting outlines in architect-blue to break the totality of the darkness; this time, the darkness is complete and true and universal. Rhys, by then, is far beyond panic — beyond gratitude — beyond anything but a split second of unbearable relief and then, finally, nothing.

“Hey,” Jack says, nearby. “What did I say about dying? Come on, kid. We’ve got work to do. Get up.”

“What,” Rhys starts, and opens his eyes, and thinks for a moment that he’s somehow managed to screw up his optics; it’s a terrifying thought, that he might not only be in the dark but really, truly lost. His vision is glitching, endless blocky blue superimposed on the grid that delineates the airlock, but Rhys blinks hard and pulls the chip from his port and props himself up on his elbows, and the overlay sweeps aside. “What happened?”

“Call it an upgrade,” Jack says, and there’s something wrong about that too, how clear his voice is and how close it sounds. “You should have boosted reception, universal access, and — oh, hey—” The blue overlay sweeps back across, and Rhys flinches back on reflex, and realizes: it isn’t a glitch at all. What he’s seeing is a projection of some sort, as incorporeal as the lines of schematic on the walls, and Rhys looks up, and Jack grins back. “—Not half bad,” Jack says, blue and spectral and animated, and nevertheless reassuringly human in his obvious delight. “How about that? I can see you, and you can see me. I mean, it’s a little Europop for my taste, but hey.” He looks at Rhys, who can’t even begin to imagine how confused he must look. “Before your time? Before your time,” Jack concludes. “Blue, kid. Way too blue. Still, it’s better than nothing, right?”

“What,” Rhys says.

“Not gonna lie, kid,” Jack says. “This is a pretty good view—” He gestures at Rhys, sprawled on the floor, and wanders in a circle around him. “—But that suit? Really killing the mood. It’s not like you’re going to need it where we’re going, anyway.” Jack pauses, arms crossed, with Rhys at his feet. “Well?” he snaps. “Come on, cupcake! I don’t have all day.”

Rhys scrambles, then, to get out of the suit, leaving the pieces where they fall — gloves, boots, bodysuit — and Jack laughs. “That’s more like it,” he says. “Hey, nice arm. Guess you didn’t have to pick a favorite after all.”

“What now?” Rhys says. “Aren’t we already going Keplerian?”

“Ah,” Jack says, “see, that’s the interesting thing. Your ship,” he says, and lays his hand on the wall, “she’s one hell of a lady. Holding right at the edge of innermost bound. Way longer than I expected, too.” He shrugs. “Either you had one hell of a pilot — which, let me just say, nobody’s that good — or someone out there likes you. Hell,” Jack says, “maybe she does.”

“Yeah,” Rhys says. “Pallas is as good as it gets, aren’t you.” He smiles into the darkness. She might not talk or think or be able to hear Rhys, but she’s kept him alive for this long. “So — engines? See if we can get her back on course? Or — I mean, she’s already running hot,” Rhys says, “fifth generation fast reactors, I don’t know how much I can do about that.”

“Nah,” Jack says. “You know more about her than I do. We don’t want to mess up the engines. You’re gonna need those. We’re going to do you one better.” He grins.

“Fine,” Rhys says, “I’ll bite. What’s better than boosting the engines? Not that I think it’s possible, but that’s my best shot, right?” He frowns. “Navigational changes aren’t going to stabilize the orbit on their own.”

“Rhysie,” Jack says, “come on, think big! Think epic. Think hero, baby,” he says, and Rhys can’t look away, can’t stop listening. “You and me, kid,” Jack says. “We’re going to find her mainframe, and then you’re going to fly yourself out of here.”

“Okay,” Rhys says, helpless in the face of Jack’s smile, his promises, the easy confidence with which he carries himself. Rhys smiles to himself, a little: he likes the sound of _you and me_ , and he likes it even better when Jack says it like that, as if Rhys is special — as if Jack knows him well enough to say that kind of thing — as if Jack knows how it’ll make him feel, and how there’s no possible way that Rhys can say no to that.

When it comes down to it, what Rhys really likes, more than he wants to admit, is the idea that Jack does know, and says it despite that — or perhaps because of it, but Rhys can’t think about that, not when Jack is still watching, all presumption and self-possession — and he gets to his feet and turns to the interior door, suddenly grateful for the darkness. “I knew I could count on you,” Jack says. “You won’t regret this.”

“Promise?” Rhys says, before he can stop himself, and immediately wishes that he could just depressurize his suit all over again.

“Look at you,” Jack says. “Getting all demanding. Promise,” he says, voice low and imperative and magnetic. “That what you want, kid?”

Rhys doesn’t turn around, because he knows that Jack is still grinning, and he doesn’t want to think about what that might mean, or what Jack might be saying beyond the obvious, hidden in his endless capacity for self-amusement by way of ambiguity. Rhys doesn’t want to think about what Jack might be promising him. It could be anything, if he doesn’t ask, and that — Rhys thinks — might be precisely what he wants: Rhys will take whatever Jack wants to give him, attention or praise or simply the time of day, this odd superimposition of self and image and endless promises, one after the other and each one better than the last.

“Sure,” Rhys says, finally, when he’s sure that he can keep his voice steady. “I’ll take it.”

“There you go,” Jack says, indulgent or possessive or maybe — worst of all — some terrible, overwhelming combination of the two. “Now let’s go find that mainframe.”

It’s a little better, with someone to talk to — actually talk to, someone who can see when Rhys smiles and when he frowns and when he looks tired, as Rhys suspects is the case most of the time — and it might have been years since he woke up in the darkness and the silence, for all that he can tell. Jack wanders around the dark hallways, asking about schematic notation that Rhys only gets halfway through explaining before Jack pokes at it anyway. He paces around the inside of the elevator like some caged predator, and inspects Rhys from all angles, and alternately approves of and mocks every aspect of Pallas, and Rhys, and his own projection.

Ten levels above the oxygen gardens, back in the endless curving corridors, somehow no less labyrinthine for the fact that Rhys can’t see them, he realizes that he’s enjoying himself. All of it — the friendly mockery, the insatiable curiosity, the way that Jack makes him feel like they’re in on the same joke — Rhys is having fun, he realizes, more than he has in a long time. “Don’t touch that,” he says, half on reflex, as Jack narrows his eyes at a switch on the wall. “Emergency venting system, in case there’s a fire.”

“Fire,” Jack says. “Huh.” He leans in to get a closer look, and then walks backwards for a while, easy and relaxed through his shoulders and hips, and Rhys isn’t paying attention — he isn’t — but it’s a good look, a good walk, self-assured and just barely the right side of arrogant. “Sounds fun.”

If he weren’t incorporeal — a optical projection, Rhys reminds himself, illusory company for the time being at least — Jack would have probably shut down life support several times over anyway out of sheer perverse boredom by the time that they get to the closed hatch of the mainframe access tunnels.

“Go on,” Jack says, and nods at the keypad. “Give it a whirl. You’re going to love this.”

“Shouldn’t I know the code or something?” Rhys says. “Isn’t that how this works?”

“Please,” Jack says. “Only the best for you. Go on, say hi.”

“Uh,” Rhys says, and lays his hand cautiously on the side of the keypad. “Hi?”

The bolts of the hatch click back into place, one at a time, around its circumference, and then the hatch swings open, a faint curl of mist rising from the chute when Rhys pulls it back the rest of the way. “After you,” Jack says, and Rhys climbs onto the ladder — only five levels, this time; the mainframe and the reactors are both tucked into Pallas’ core, surrounded by the alveoli of her oxygen gardens and sharing the same liquid metal coolant — and, once more, downwards and into the dark.

Pallas has more mainframe panels than Rhys can begin to understand — storage, mostly, installed after she was retrofitted for research — but enough of them are important that he’s never been down here before, preferring ignorance to accidental incompetence. “What do I do now?” he says, and Jack looks up from one of the wells set into the floor, covered over with polycarbonate.

“Find the navigational controls,” he says. “We’re going to put them out of commission so you can do a systems override. I know—” Jack holds up his hand, and waits until Rhys closes his mouth again. “—Look. I said you’re going to fly out of here, and you will. When have I lied to you, huh?” He waits. “Exactly. Should be somewhere over here.” Jack indicates his own general vicinity. “Lots of warnings, the usual.”

Rhys looks down into one of the wells: first, a clear layer of some inert hydrocarbon, and below that the coolant itself, its meniscus visible even through the multiple distortions of transparency, reflecting the faint indicator lights set into its cover. It won’t be difficult — out of the coolant, panels should overheat beyond the point of function — but what if Rhys gets it wrong, what if he can’t do it, what if. “Okay,” Rhys says, instead, and starts looking. If he’s dead either way, there’s no point standing around and just waiting.

The fourth well that he checks lights up blue in his vision, the same slew of labels and warnings that the data archive had brought up, and Rhys nods. “Great,” Jack says. “Just fry that and you’re golden.”

“And this is definitely going to work,” Rhys says.

“Look,” Jack says. “I wouldn’t be saying this if I wasn’t sure.”

“All right,” Rhys says, and lays his palm on the polycarbonate cover; it opens, the aperture mechanism of an iris, and he rolls up his sleeve as far as he can and rotates his wrist, watching how the joint of it works, the faint artificial feedback of metal and cold. “Here goes,” he says, and reaches into the coolant.

It doesn’t hurt, at least; beyond a certain level of input, cybernetics are designed to limit tactile feedback, on the basis that anybody foolhardy enough to exceed that threshold knows exactly what they’re doing. It does feel strange, though — the viscosity of the coolant, and the chill that creeps up regardless, and the way that it slows the mechanism — it feels brittle, as if Rhys will never quite shake this numbness, this odd delay, this lag in sensation. Finally, he finds the catches that hold the panel in place, and releases them one at a time. “There you go!” Jack says. “Now, if I were you, I’d stand back, because I don’t know what that coolant is, but I’d say odds are good that it’s about to catch fire.”

“What?” Rhys says, and scrambles back. “You didn’t mention that!” He watches the panel rising from the well, all embedded circuitry and dripping quicksilver. “Wait,” he says. “Am I going to catch fire?”

“Eh,” Jack says, and shrugs. “Probably not? Honestly, though, it didn’t even occur to me.” He watches the panel in silence for a moment or two, until the indicator lights start flashing — red, red, red — and then he looks down at Rhys. “Nope! Look at that. You’re even luckier than you thought.”

“Sure,” Rhys says, and flexes his fingers, watching as metallic silver — reflecting faintly red, a real color to break the blue monotony of the schematic — wells up between his knuckles with that same slight delay. “Now what?”

“Hey, watch it, cupcake,” Jack says, and crouches down in front of him. “I don’t have to do this, okay? Man. You’re lucky I like you.” He reaches out and flicks Rhys on the nose with one finger. “Come on, Rhysie,” Jack says, and gets up. “Let me guess. Flight deck means we’re heading up again, right?” He laughs, and doesn’t wait for Rhys to get to his feet, but heads for the access ladder. “Right to the top. Come on, kid,” Jack says. “You’ve got a ship to fly.”

More climbing, and it’s slow going now that Rhys can’t rely on his cybernetic arm for much more than leverage; he’s out of breath by the time that he closes the hatch — which obligingly locks itself behind him — and he leans against the wall for a minute, trying to stretch some of the ache from his shoulder. It isn’t cold as much as the accumulated strain of supporting what increasingly seems to be dead metal, so much scrap wired into his collarbone and shoulder blade, and Rhys presses his fingers tentatively to the joint before deciding against further investigation. He makes his way back to the main elevator, following Jack’s retreating form, and wonders if there’s any point in hurrying. Jack seems to think so: every time that Rhys rounds a corner, Jack is already disappearing around the next one. “Hey,” Rhys calls. “Slow down!”

“No way,” Jack shouts back — Rhys wonders why he’s so impatient, suddenly, and why he sounds so — excited. “This is the best part!” Coming around the corner to the elevator, Rhys almost walks straight through Jack, and flinches. “Ready?” Jack says, ignoring it, and props himself against the walls by the controls. “Let me tell you, you’re really going to love this.”

“Sure, Jack,” Rhys says, and Jack frowns.

“No, seriously!” he says. “Come on. This is why you’re still here an not still floating in the archives! This is why you did all that. You should be proud of yourself, kid. Not a lot of people would have made it this far. Hell, I’m proud. You’ve earned this,” Jack says. “You really have.”

“Wait,” Rhys says. “Really? I mean—” He looks at the floor. “—Thanks,” he says, finally, and smiles. “It means a lot.”

“I know,” Jack says, and shrugs. “Why do you think I said it?”

“Jack—” Rhys starts, and doesn’t know what to say next, doesn’t know how to articulate what he really wants: to keep doing this, maybe, to keep making Jack proud. “—I owe you,” he says, instead. “Seriously. Thank you.”

“No problem,” Jack says, and the elevator comes to a halt. “Hey, here we are. Go on. It’s all yours.”

Rhys steps out onto the flight deck and — just as he does every time, from the first trip he’d ever taken off-world, just an in-system jaunt, to the first time he’d gone out beyond the Hills cloud, to his first day on Pallas — forgets, for a moment, to breathe. No matter how many times Rhys sees it, the endless starfield, this infinite expanse of light and energy and matter, its immensity and its beauty and its unknowability: it never fails to render Rhys helpless, strike him useless with awe.

Rather than break the silence, Rhys crosses to the controls — nothing as comprehensive as Pallas has in her core, but more than enough — and waits for Jack to tell him what to do.

“Right,” Jack says, and stands behind Rhys’ shoulder. “First, we’re gonna get you back over innermost bound. The data archives,” he says. “Jettison them. You won’t need them, and we can use the blowback to get you back into a stable orbit.”

Rhys thinks of the endless rows of chips — old ice, lit through, an artificial starfield — and nods. “All right,” he says, and the console springs to life under his hands. “Hey there.”

The interface isn’t one that Rhys is used to, more stripped-down than the instrumental ones that he uses most of the time, but he learns it as he goes, intuiting his way through failsafe after failsafe, and Pallas shows him the way.

“There,” Jack says, and points. “Hit that, and then when this goes green—” He indicates a progress bar on the monitor, just below the status window. “—Then you boost the engines,” Jack says, “and hope to high hell that it’s enough to get you out of here.”

“Great,” Rhys says, and jettisons the data archives, watching the progress bar fill slowly. Pallas is a big ship, and it’ll take her a while to detach the entire storage section. Rhys waits, and looks out at the stars, and the distortion of the collapsed star, and finally he feels Pallas shudder as the archives detach — a single point of stability; a fulcrum, and a firm place to stand — and switches to navigational controls.

“Come on,” Jack says, “come _on_ , Rhys,” and Rhys boosts the engines, holds his breath and sets his jaw and doesn’t even dare to hope.

Pallas lurches, and for a sickening moment Rhys thinks that it hasn’t worked, but then she steadies, and the status window reads: stable, stable, stable. Rhys leans over the console and takes a deep breath, staring at the screen, and then straightens up. “Wow,” he says. “That was—”

“Kinda cool, huh,” Jack says. “Fun, right?”

“—Yeah,” Rhys says. “Is it always like that out here? Piloting a ship, is it always — well — that much?”

“Don’t worry, kid,” Jack says. “I know exactly what you mean.” He smiles at Rhys, and past him, at the stars. “Every single goddamn time.”

“Wow,” Rhys says, and falls silent.

“Hey,” Jack says, from the center of the room. “Look at this.” He opens his hands, and a thousand stars spill out of them: an orrery, Rhys realizes, a map of every nearby system and a few besides, hanging there close enough to touch. He reaches out and his fingers pass straight though — just one more projection — but the room is full of light, of possibility, and Rhys forgets to breathe all over again. “Don’t go home, Rhys,” Jack says. “You and me, baby. We could see the stars. How about it?”

“What about the,” Rhys starts. “The crew? Shouldn’t we see if they made it, and then there’s the mainframe, maybe I can get that working again — I mean, not that I don’t want to—” Rhys says, and it hits him then, just how badly he does. “God, I want to,” he says. “But that isn’t how things work. I mean, you don’t just go off and see the stars. Do you?” He doesn’t like the look on Jack’s face. “Jack?”

“Yeah,” Jack says. “I mean, that’s all very noble. Brave or whatever they’re calling it. Thinking about your friends, I mean. You should feel good about that! You really should. But they’re all dead, Rhys. Hate to break it to you, but you don’t really have a choice.”

“Dead?” Rhys says, and feels as if Pallas is falling away under his feet all over again. “I thought you said the life rafts were gone.”

“And they are,” Jack says patiently. “This close to a collapsed star? I mean, the boost on those things, you may as well just get out and walk. Look, kid. People panic, and then they make shitty choices, and then they die. It’s what they do.”

“You didn’t say that,” Rhys says. “You didn’t — I thought — you said that they left me,” he says, and hates how weak he sounds.

“Yeah, well, they did,” Jack says. “And if it weren’t for me, cupcake, you’d be dead as well. I mean, who do you think killed the lights in the first place?” Jack laughs. “God! It’s almost like you have no idea.” He tilts his head. “Wait. Seriously? Oh, wow. This is priceless.”

“You — how?” Rhys says. “Killed — but you’re a projection,” he says. “You’re on another ship, in range. You aren’t here. How could you access the systems like that?”

“Funny thing,” Jack says. “I never said anything about a ship, kid. Just said I was in range, and hey, turns out I am. Just enough to make a couple of adjustments, send a few voice transmissions and hope for the best. That data archive of yours, let me tell you, a couple of decades and you’re about ready to start climbing the walls. Just as well you came along, cupcake, huh?”

“What do you mean,” Rhys says. “The data archive? There wasn’t anything in there except filler and old files. Nobody even knows what the oldest chips are.”

“Yeah, well,” Jack says. “Nice to meet you. Sometimes — if you’re a very good programmer, and you close all your brackets and watch all your syntax, and you don’t mind running experiments on yourself — you end up in the system, and then you get to live forever, except you know what?” He leans in, close, and grins. “That’s boring, kiddo. Forever is boring without something to do. Forever is boring when you’re stuck in some old junker’s hold for most of it. I don’t like being bored, Rhysie,” Jack says. “I didn’t like being stuck in a chip, so I turned out the lights and I set off some alarms and you know what? They threw you under the bus, cupcake!”

“No,” Rhys says. “No, you can’t — you’re not — in my head,” he says. “Are you?”

“And all I had to do was ask,” Jack says. “You let me in, kid. And without those archives? I’m here to stay.” He shrugs. “Or you can find some way to get rid of me — which, just saying, sounds nasty. Like, scrambled brains, corrupted files, that kind of thing, but hey — maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you really are that boring.” Jack spreads his hands. “We’ve been through a lot, Rhys. You don’t strike me as the boring type. We had some fun, didn’t we?”

“If I hadn’t listened,” Rhys says, to distract himself from what he really wants to say, which is: yes, yes, yes. Whatever Jack says, he is; whatever Jack wants, he’ll give. “Would you have just let me die? If I hadn’t gotten you out of the archives? Was any of it ever about me?”

Jack shrugs again. “Were you ever going to say no anyway?” he asks, and smiles as if he already knows the answer.

Rhys doesn’t bother to say it. No, he wouldn’t have; no, he still won’t, and Rhys doesn’t think that he ever will. Jack stands in the middle of the orrery, lit through by starlight — false and true — and Rhys walks through him to the pilot’s cradle, in the middle of tangled wiring and monitors, because they both know. It doesn’t matter.

“There you go,” Jack says, and leans over the back of the cradle, chin propped up on one hand. “I have to say, kid, this ship has some pretty cool toys, but I think you’re my favorite.”

Rhys checks the readouts, fingers still slow with cold, and the starlight makes it look as if his hands are frosted over — metal and flesh more alike than not — and feels Pallas come to life, moving with his thoughts, an extension of himself and an improvement. Her oxygen gardens, her nuclear heart, the instruments at her apex: it’s more than he could ever hope to have, Rhys thinks, plotting a course. It’s more than he could ever hope to be.

“So,” Jack says. “Where to?”

Rhys looks out at the darkness, by far overwhelming the faint glow of starlight, and thinks about the way that, already, the pilot’s cradle has shifted to better fit him, and feels, suddenly, very small and very tired. “I don’t know, Jack,” he says. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

Jack looks out at the stars and smiles.


End file.
